CORRESPONDENCE
217
The Rukeyser Imbroglio (cont'd)
Sirs:
Your defense of your attack on Mu–
riel Rukeyser seems still to obscure the
main issue: that, instead of criticizing
an author's work, you have made un–
justifiable charges about her character.
You have made her sound like a slick
careerist, whereas her writing shows
her to have been throughout the past
decade a convinced anti-fascist and
radical democrat. Since you ask for
specific evidence, I would advance these
few points out of many:
(1) Your remark that Miss Rukey–
ser's first work "rode the bandwagon
of proletarian literature" seems some–
thing less than candid, inasmuch as her
poem in the 1935 anthology of that
literature originally appeared, I be–
lieve, in PR, under the editorship of
Rahv and Phillips.
(2) You convey the impressions that
in
The Turning Wind
she veered away
from radical convictions, since they
were no longer "fashionable" by 1939.
Such an impression cannot be sub–
stantiated by that book, with its con–
tinuing concern for Spain, for poverty
and social inequalities at home, and,
in particular, with its poem about Ann
Burlak. The following sentences seem
symptomatic of your method: "In one
poem the turning wind was figured in
the symbol of a man torturing an
eagle. The eagle was not the blue eagle
of the springtime of the New Deal."
There is no "turning wind" in "Target
Practice," the poem to which these
sentences refer. Nor is there any politi–
cal symbol in the bird, which is not
specified as an eagle. Nor is there tor–
ture, since the bird is already dead,
nailed up against the barn for a custom
familiar to our West. The poem is
about something else altogether: the
shocked consciousness of a small boy,
and the contrast between the dead bird
and another soaring free.
(3) You say: "The Japanese did not
astonish Miss Rukeyser, much as they
surprised Admiral Kimmel and Gen–
eral Short." Why should they have
astonished any student of Fascism? As
early as 1936 Miss Rukeyser had writ–
ten the captions for a film called
Stop
Japan.
(4) You say that her essay on pos–
ters hints that Miss Rukeyser "is now
interested in the advertising game."
She resigned from her position with
the Graphics Division of the OWI on
the ground that it was being run by
advertisers. Her essay argued for the
necessity of using all the techniques of
popular art for militantly democratic
ends. To shrug off propaganda as being
somehow beneath the concern of a
serious poet would be to retire to the
now fashionable red ivory tower.
F. 0. MATTHIESSEN
Cambridge, Mass.
Comment.-We
are impressed neither
by Matthiessen's citing of Miss Rukey–
ser's anti-fascist professions nor by his
use of the ter:m "radical democrat."
Anti-fascism is nowadays so popular a
concept as to cover a wide variety of
political beliefs or lack of them. Mter
all, both imperialist-minded politicians
and socialists active in the European
underground speak and act in the name
of anti-fascism. And what, precisely is
a "radical democrat"? We are
~ot
aware of the address or specific pro–
gram of any such political party or
grouping. To us the term suggests an
impassioned reader of the newspaper
PM.
Is a "radical democrat" opposed
to Stalin's totalitarian regime, for ex–
ample?
Is
he committed to socialist
ideals or is he content to support the
Roosevelt administration? Again, just
what is a "radical democrat"?
As for Mr. Matthiessen's specific
points:
1.
Not only Miss Rukeyser's poem
but many other pieces by writers whose
subsequent careers we have not en–
dorsed appeared in the early issues of
PARTISAN REVIEW. The list of literary
and political casualties is fairly long.
2. The poem in question is admitted–
ly obscure, and Mr. Matthiessen offers
no more than an alternative reading of
it. The last stanza, with its reference
to "war," we understood in a political
